This is a blog about the radical notion that women are people. I also like some other radical notions, like that words mean things, or that sometimes things are connected to other things, or that context is real.

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Friday, 18 January 2013

This post was originally called "Reclaiming Domesticity", written for Too Fat For Our Pants on Radio One 91FM on January 16 2012. I have edited some parts slightly.

This post was a response to a blog by Emily Matchar in the Washinton Post, and a reply by Jamie Stiehm in US News, which struck something of a nerve for me. Matchar
writes about the “new domesticity zeitgeist” which she sees sweeping up
her female friends: women learning to knit, sew, bake bread, grow
vegetables, keep bees. Stiehm’s concern is that the
revival of traditional skills and an appreciation of homesteading is
fetishized nostalgia and a glorification of domesticity, and that the
renewed valuing of those skills also necessitates a return to the
slightly-more-extreme gender imbalances that accompanied them. She
worries that women will run back into the kitchen, thinking
it’s all a bit of fun, and will unwittingly wind up trapped there just
like their grandmothers. She worries that any return to
performance of those tasks will also initiate a return to defining women
by those tasks, to a cultural acceptance that women aren’t good for
anything outside the kitchen. She's maybe right to be skeptical of "privileged domesticity"- though I suspect a little undercurrent of hipster-bashing, the rebuttal to which I turn to Sady Doyle - but she doesn't recognize that the ability to dismiss the doing of domestic chores is itself a privileged position.

I do not intend this to be a defense of women's performance of domestic labour, but the labour itself: I believe the work is undervalued because it is performed by women, and that simultaneously the (still mostly) women performing the work are undervalued for their performance of it.

At
the heart of Stiehm’s disapproval of Matchar’s article is her
unexamined and unstated assumption that being in the home is bad for
women, and that returning there is against our best interests. I’ve
often thought that this was an oversight of second-wave feminism,
which, instead of rejecting the notion that domesticity is exclusively
woman’s domain, or that women are best suited to domesticity, rejected
domesticity itself. What should have been - and started
out as - a conversation about the undervaluing of the work performed in
the home (think of the Wages for Housework Campaign),
and the relationship it bears to the undervaluing of the gender doing
most of that work, became instead a conversation about getting women out
of the home and into the workplace, which has from there turned into a
conversation about women struggling to balance work and family. Now, I am in no way suggesting that women should leave the workplace and return to the home. But
that work is still performed primarily by women, and women being a
lesser social class than men, the work they do is also seen as lesser. If
we can bring some value to the work women are doing while we’re also
trying to simply value women as a social class, that makes it easier for
that work to stop being so gender-segregated. If we can
acknowledge that the work itself is necessary and important, then the
workers also become so, and it becomes easier for men to take on more
domestic tasks, which makes it easier for everyone to balance work and
family.

First-
and second-wave feminism fought to break down gendered barriers to
entry in the work place and offer women the choice to work or to stay
home. Not to rehash all the compelling and obvious arguments against the mantra of "personal choice", but the
ability to choose represents a level of privilege which is simply not
available to most women: a proliferation of various options is, itself, a
privilege, in addition to indicating membership in a particular social
class. And this particular conversation is doubly let down
by a narrative of personal choice because it was very clear that the
only truly feminist choice to make was to leave the home, which was the
seat of oppression, and enter the workforce. Rather than
trying to bring power to the work done by mostly women all over the
world, rather than acknowledging that the problem wasn’t the work, but
the lack of value assigned to it specifically because of the gender
doing most of it, the work itself became symbolic of that oppression. Escaping the oppression of being confined to the domestic sphere meant escaping domesticity altogether.

It’s
a racist narrative because the women who have the least options open to
them, the women who couldn’t possibly decide not to go to work once
they had children, or who have jobs with less security and less flexible
hours and lower pay, are disproportionately represented by black, Hispanic, Aboriginal
peoples all over the world, Maori and Pasifika people here in New
Zealand, and globally in general anyone who’s not white. So
framing the decision to return to domestic skills and knowledge as a
step backwards for women, as is so often done, marginalizes and silences
all the women who never had the choice to leave the home or return to
it in the first place. More than that, it paints them as
the kind of women we shouldn’t want to be: if being empowered is wrapped
up in the ability to exempt oneself from the tasks of cooking and
cleaning and growing food, the implication is that all those women who
do perform those tasks are not empowered, because the tasks are not
powerful. And I think that contributes to the harm being
done to those women, and therefore the harm that’s done to everyone who
identifies as a woman.

The
idea that domesticity is anti-feminist was seized upon and perpetuated
by marketers of products like processed food, which were meant to be
freeing women from the tedious drudgery of cooking, at the same time
that women were continually being told that keeping house was the
greatest possible achievement for a woman. Housework is both anti-feminist and the pinnacle of femininity: we’ve always been good at conflicting narratives. And
certainly some women were freed from tedious drudgery, but it happened
not by sharing a workload more evenly or valuing the work so that it’s
less drudgery, so that both parties in the household appreciate the
importance of dinner and what it takes to make, but by outsourcing the
tasks to McCain and Betty Crocker and everyone to whom they outsourced. It’s like an STD ad from the 90s – you’re having sex with everyone he’s had sex with. Food
companies created a market by selling specifically women on products
which were unhealthy, which were economically, environmentally, and
socially expensive, and they specifically used the language of female
empowerment to do so. Feminism became another market,
another avenue for capital absorption, part of the post-war spatial fix
defined by suburbanization. I think there’s a whole other show in there, a feminist reading of the second spatial fix.

Just
as an aside, many of those products which were meant to make the
keeping of a house a simpler, less labour-intensive task in fact had the
opposite effect. Things like dishwashers and vacuum
cleaners are time savers, to be sure, but they also raise the bar on the
acceptable level of cleanliness for a house. So less and
less dirt is tolerated anywhere, to the point that now we’re being sold
anti-bacterial disposable counter-wipes which eliminate 97% of germs,
like we can’t even have microscopic dirt. Your house now not only has to be clean, it has to be sterile. That’s not liberation from housework, that’s a company manufacturing a market for a product that isn’t needed and
co-opting the language of either feminism (“you don’t have time to do
housework, you’re a high-powered woman on the go!”) or motherhood (“we
know you care about your family too much to let them anywhere near
germs!”).

Though
I don’t see the feminist analysis used often these days, there is most
certainly an aspect of political resistance to this domesticity
zeitgeist. Partly it represents a growing awareness that
our way of life is finite, that we do not exist in a post-industrial
economy but have simply outsourced our industry to poorer countries. One
of the side effects was that we ceased to value those production skills
in favour of consumption ability, which is of course a highly
class-based project which excludes huge numbers of people, the majority
of whom are female. Part of the political aspect of
adopting more traditional ways of life, like homesteading and
small-holding and more ethical and local eating habits, the resurgence
of farmer’s markets, is an acknowledgement that being able to live in
any other way is a luxury and an anomaly in human history, and one that
is subsidized by people, mostly women, mostly in poorer and browner
places.

It’s
also an acknowledgement that even aside from the exploitative
underpinnings of the entire western way of life, the financial crisis is
alerting people to the flimsiness of a consumption economy and the
inherent problems with the perpetual growth paradigm. I
think this has prompted people who are able to begin learning skills to
survive in an economy which requires less consumption and greater
production, as well as an environment which necessitates it. Some of
this renaissance of domesticity is simple survival; this way of life has
always been expensive, and many people who were previously able to
afford it are now not, and so are being forced to adapt. Sometimes that adaptation takes the form of making more and buying less.

Finally,
though the first two points are reason enough for me, there is the
simple fact that all these systems of food transport, factory farming,
processing, outsourcing of labour, all the systems which have granted
some women freedom from the work of sustaining themselves, are based on
the assumption of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. And those are just not going to be around anymore. We
are absolutely going to have to start performing domestic tasks,
whether we like it or not, and so we might as well begin to talk about
how necessary and valuable those skills are. And if we can
do that, we can also begin to talk about how necessary and valuable the
(mostly) women who perform them are, as well. If
anything’s a step backwards for women, it’s an absolute refusal to see
worth in the work that is done by women all over the world, to insist
that domesticity is “nostalgia”, that it is distasteful, or that it is
something to be avoided. Steihm and those who agree with
her are only succeeding in favouring their own privilege over the
pursuit of true gender equality, for all women, everywhere.

Many
women are relearning tasks their grandmothers knew, but as this return
to domesticity has roots and ties to political resistance rather than
simple nostalgia, there are also many men. The trendiness
of homesteading is useful for prompting discussions about the value of
this work which has always been performed almost exclusively by women,
and by extension therefore the value of women as a social class. And
I recognize the problems with what I’m saying, here: like it took men’s
interest in domestic chores to start talking about them as valuable,
productive work, and I don’t at all want to encourage that. But
I do think that an increased awareness in the male social consciousness
of the energy, intelligence, and skill required for this kind of
voluntary labour can only benefit the class which most often performs
that labour. And I also recognize that I’m attempting to
raise the worth of women through their connection to an increasingly
valuable skill set, rather than raising the value of the skill set
through an increase in the value of women, but I’m not sure they’re so
different – or at least, they’re not incompatible. Either way, what interests me is a shift in the way we value work altogether.

Because
it’s not enough for me to have women and people of colour succeed in a
system which was created with only one social class, white men, in mind,
which is what we’ve been aiming for; I want a system which is designed
to be equal. I don’t want us all to agree to only value
the same things that the economic system values, as those are not
representative of the full range of human experience, and success means
embodying and exemplifying the traits that the economic system values –
selfishness, cold rationality, efficiency. I don’t want to
try and fit into the parameters of the market; the market is a human
construction, its parameters should include all of humanity. I don’t want women’s success in a man’s world, I want a new world which is for everyone. I know that sounds idealistic. But
listen, we’ve been ten thousand years with more or less the same power
structure, as far as gender relations go, and a good few millennia as
far as race relations go, so it’s ridiculous to expect that everything
would be equal after a century’s work. Social change takes time, and it’s ok that we’re not there yet, but it’s only ok as long as we keep talking about getting there.

Hey! I'm going to be migrating some of the posts from my radio blog Too Fat For Our Pants, so that I can close the comments over there. I have no idea how to pre-date them for when they were originally written, so they'll just go up in whatever order I post them in.